Negotiations to end a national railway strike broke down yesterday, leaving millions of rush-hour commuters stranded as workers walked off the job for a second day.
Korea Railroad (KORAIL), the state railway monopoly, said that it would cut the number of trains in service yesterday from 2,623 to 822, leaving many of the country's 2.6 million train commuters facing long delays on crowded platforms.
A senior police officer told Yonhap news agency that police might take action later in the day to disrupt the strike.
"Action could take place as early as this evening to break up strike rallies. Any police action will come as a blitzkrieg," the officer was quoted as saying.
Following the threat of police action, about 6,000 workers who had been rallying at a railway depot in eastern Seoul for the past two days, began to disperse. The union called for members to hold smaller protests in many different places.
KORAIL's 16,000 employees walked off the job on Wednesday, demanding that union leaders fired during past strike action be re-hired and that 500 female staff working on the high-speed KTX trains get improved job security and benefits.
Overnight talks that lasted eight hours into early yesterday made no progress, management and the union representatives said.
"Through the overnight talks, we tried to narrow differences but the union's demands were too much for us to swallow," Yu Jae-young, a senior official in charge of KORAIL labor affairs, said to reporters.
The union's spokeman, Cho Sang-soo, said management was insisting that the striking workers return to work before substantive talks take place.
"It amounts to a declaration by the management that it will not seek a solution through dialogue," he said.
KORAIL fired 67 union members and leaders between 1998 and 2004 when the railway workers walked out in opposition to the privatization of railway services. The government later decided to drop the plan.
The female attendants on KTX were hired by a KORAIL subsidiary as temporary workers when the high-speed train service was launched in April 2004.
"The union's demands go beyond management control. They are concerned with government policy considerations and that's why it is so difficult for both sides to find common ground," said Kim Gyung-jae, a spokesman of KORAIL.
Thousands of striking workers, including engineers and drivers, have been holed up at railway depots in Seoul and universities in four other provincial cities.
Riot police were deployed near the rally sites after state prosecutors on Tuesday issued an order to arrest 11 key union leaders involved in what they say is an illegal strike.
The strike automatically became illegal when workers defied a 15-day ban on any labor action that was imposed on Tuesday by the labor commission as a prelude to arbitration.
The railway stoppage came as the militant Korean Confederation of Trade Unions called for a second one-day general strike later yesterday against a bill which would allow employers greater flexibility to use temporary and sub-contracted workers.
The union called a one-day strike on Tuesday which shut down work sites across the country, including the assembly lines at the country's biggest automaker Hyundai Motor.
The labor unrest was thought likely to intensify as the ruling Uri Party was to set to try to pass the controversial labor bill through parliament yesterday.
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